Image 1: Life. May 13, 1946; p. 123.
I approached this project with the hopes of comparing portrayals of blacks from the 1940s-50s. However, I found it almost impossible to find images of blacks in the 1940s that weren't connected with the realm of entertainment: singers, athletes, etc. The representations of the "American Dream" in advertisements for consumer goods directly after WWII were extremely whitewashed, portraying a sense of patriotism for a homogenous society. Therefore, blacks were left out of the picture in what it meant to be "American" in the post-war period. They participated in forms of entertainment for whites but could not enjoy the American lifestyle. Additionally, this signifies that racism was largely ignored or hidden in American society. The notion of a happy and successful post-war America was one free of internal tensions, but bound together with moral institutions of the family. In admitting the existence of the "other" in American society, a Pandora's Box of negative feelings towards race relations would threaten the stability of such a society.
In the mid-fifties after the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in 1954 (Brown vs. Board of Education), these representations began to shift toward a more racist tone. The second image comes from 1956, the same year as the Birmingham bus riots; it shows Percy Faith, an American musician, being served whiskey by his butler, "Robert". A lingering sense of white dominance over blacks is addressed quite openly in this ad, putting the black man in his proper place below. As blacks resisted systems of segregation and exclusion in America during the Civil Rights Movement, the threat that was posed to the American ideal caused tensions in how American society was now to be displayed. The relationship between the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement was one of national security; as all American institutions were analyzed in the context of democracy's superiority of communism, internal conflicts of race and the irony of racism in a democratic society threatened to undermine the United States' upper-hand.
The shift throughout this decade is one simply of recognition. Civil Rights activists were successful in allowing people to see these injustices or at least putting them out in the open. However, blacks were still excluded from the American Dream and now were visibly forced outside of it or antagonized. In comparing the images, the first image of a solitary white man drinking his whiskey contrasts with the second in two ways: first, it shows the shift from absence of blacks to representation in popular culture, and second, this representation admitted to true feelings on race and a sense of cultural insensitivity. Although both images represent the American Dream, one is much more honest in its recognition of racial hierarchy.
No comments:
Post a Comment